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National Day of Action on Planetary Health
On October 6, 2025, CAPE is launching Canada's first-ever National Day of Action on Planetary Health. This bold, nationwide initiative calls on health care professionals to take a stand for the health of our patients and planet.
"Canada's first-ever National Day of Action on Planetary Health is a perfect opportunity for health professionals to show up, learn and walk together on the path forward to sustainability: for our health care system, for our patients, and for the planet. Every action, big or small, and every signature on our open letter to government counts—and demonstrates our collective commitment to a healthy future. Join us!"
~ Dr. Melissa Lem
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Article - Healing Needs Nature: Bring the Forest to Your City
Physicians in Canada are increasingly prescribing “20 minutes in nature” as part of health care — evidence shows even brief exposure to green space can reduce stress, improve mood, lower blood pressure, and boost attention.
To make nature more accessible — especially for those in urban areas — the advocates suggest bringing greenery into medical settings: planting trees and gardens around hospitals, clinics, and long-term care homes.
Groups like Trees for Hamilton and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care are already planting thousands of trees at health care sites and pushing for more green coverage in cities to improve wellbeing and fight climate-stressors.
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Webinar - Developing Health Care Leadership to Achieve Climate and Resiliency Goals
Dates/Times: Sept 30, 20:00–21:30 CET or Oct 1, 15:00–16:30 CET
Where: Virtual
Join the Geneva Sustainability Centre, International Hospital Federation, and Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care for a two-part global event exploring the leadership competencies needed to build climate-resilient, low-carbon health systems.
Learn best practices for leadership development, strategies to overcome barriers, and real-world examples of success in advancing sustainable health care.
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Event - Sustainable by Design: Health Care Innovations for a Warming World
Date: October 3, 2025
Time: 8am-5pm ET
Location: Women’s College Hospital Auditorium, Toronto
The full program is now LIVE!
We’ve got a jam-packed day lined up with inspiring keynotes, insightful panels and presentations, and informative ‘Lightning Talks’ - rapid-fire 6-minute sessions spotlighting cutting-edge green health care solutions across specialities.
Don’t miss your chance to connect, learn, and be part of the conversation shaping the future of sustainable health care.
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Help Us Build a Greener Health System
The Coalition is now a registered charity—marking a major milestone in its 25-year mission to advance sustainability in health care. Donate today to help build a greener, healthier, and more climate-resilient Canada.
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Canadian Health Care Construction Course
The Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society is offering the only course in Canada tailored to the unique needs of health care construction professionals. Sessions cover contemporary issues in construction and renovation within the Canadian health care environment.
Dates & Locations:
- Oct 22–23, 2025 · Halifax, NS – The Prince George Hotel
- Nov 4–5, 2025 · Winnipeg, MB – Winnipeg Construction Association
- Nov 19–20, 2025 · Surrey, BC – Location TBD
- Dec 2–3, 2025 · Montreal, QC – Construction du Québec (ACQ)
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Waste Auditor Training
Dates: September 30 – October 3, 2025
Format: Zoom + In-person Audit
Reduction, reuse and recycling saves money by reducing disposal and hauling costs, and items captured for recycling can be sold as a commodity. A waste audit helps organisations identify savings and revenue opportunities.
Join the Circular Innovation Council for this 4-day professional development course based on the Standard Waste Audit Method. Learn auditing principles, sampling methods, benchmarking, and compliance while gaining hands-on experience in waste auditing.
Space is limited to 12–16 participants!, email shirley@circularinnovation.ca to express interest and reserve your spot today!
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The Reusable Textiles Revolution in Health Care
Health care generates massive plastic waste, with single-use gowns, aprons, and masks as major contributors. But safe, effective reusable alternatives already exist, and now there’s a free resource to help health care institutions make the switch.
On World Environment Day 2025 (June 5), Health Care Without Harm launched the Reusable Textiles Revolution, a self-paced online course and tool designed for health professionals and procurement teams.
- Learn how to audit textile use and evaluate reusable options
- Explore strategies for sustainable procurement and plastic reduction
- Access global case studies and practical solutions
- Earn a certificate upon completion
Join the Reusable Textiles Revolution and help transform health care into a more sustainable, low-waste system.
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Save on Energy's Expanded Energy Management Program for Health Care Facilities
Ontario hospitals and health care facilities can access support to build energy-management capacity, lower operating costs, and improve sustainability through Save on Energy’s Expanded Energy Management (EEM) program.
Hire an Energy Manager: Funding covers up to 50% of salary, to a maximum of $100,000 per facility per year.
Strategic Energy Management (SEM): No-cost expert coaching, cohort learning, and a structured curriculum with incentives for achieving energy-performance milestones.
Apply by Sept 30th to join the next Cohort of public sector participants!
| | Canadian College of Health Leaders National Awards Program - Call for Nominations | |
Recognize and promote your outstanding leaders and programs!
The Canadian College of Health Leaders is inviting nominations for the 2026 National Awards Program.
The awards recognize the importance of leadership, commitment and performance. This is a great opportunity to recognize and promote the outstanding leaders and programs in your organisation. Award recipients will be recognized during the College’s 2026 Honouring Health Leadership event. The date and format of this celebration will be announced later this year.
Individual awards nomination deadline: November 30, 2025.
Team and organisational awards nomination deadline: February 1, 2026.
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Long-range PM2.5 Pollution and Health Impacts from the 2023 Canadian Wildfires
Nature
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A Nature (2025) study shows that smoke from the 2023 Canadian wildfires spread across North America and Europe, exposing 354 million people to harmful air pollution.
Researchers estimate this led to 5,400 short-term deaths in North America and over 64,000 long-term deaths across both continents highlighting the global health risks of extreme wildfires.
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Hospitals Power Through Federal Changes with Cost-Saving Energy Projects
Health Care Without Harm
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Essential hospitals are leveraging energy-efficient systems and clean power to strengthen their ability to serve their communities. These proactive approaches help them adapt and thrive despite a challenging landscape – including a summer marked by heat waves, wildfires, and flooding, plus the recent cuts to many federal programs.
Practice Greenhealth partners Grady Memorial Hospital, Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital, and Jackson South Medical Center spent much of the last year uncovering innovative energy efficiency, sustainability, and resilience opportunities.
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SickKids Named World's Best Children's Hospital
SickKids
The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) has been named by Newsweek and Statista as the best children’s health care centre in the world, topping the list of 250 children's hospitals globally.
It is the fifth consecutive year that SickKids has been ranked among the top two paediatric hospitals in the world by Newsweek, and the second time they’ve achieved the top spot.
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Pilot Tackles Extreme Weather Risks in Leased Health Facilities
GreenCare
Vancouver Coastal Health is piloting a project to make leased health care facilities more resilient to extreme weather events like heat domes, flooding, and wildfire smoke. The initiative involves assessing risks, upgrading cooling, air filtration, and flood protection systems, and coordinating with landlords to implement changes. The pilot aims to create a model for scaling climate adaptation efforts across all leased health facilities.
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Revolutionizing Climate Control
GreenCare
Langley Memorial Hospital’s long-term care sites (Cedar Hill and Maple Hill Lodge) upgraded old cooling systems using Gas Absorption Heat Pumps (GAHP-AR) because electrical capacity upgrades weren’t feasible. The new system provides both heating and cooling, boosting winter heating efficiency to ~114-125% and reducing overall energy use by about 22%. Besides comfort during summer heat, the project cuts emissions and supports sustainability, enabled by collaboration between in-house teams, consultants, and utility incentives.
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Hospitals Face Soaring Costs from Plastic Waste Crisis
E+E Leader
Hospitals are facing skyrocketing costs tied to plastic waste—especially from single-use medical plastics—and these costs come alongside significant carbon emissions.
A recent report estimates that reducing plastic waste in health care could save up to USD 8 billion and cut plastic use in half by 2040.
Efforts to replace durable supplies, improve recycling, and rethink procurement are being flagged as key solutions.
| | NEW! RETScreen® Expert Version 9.3 | |
The RETScreen® Clean Energy Management Software Version 9.3 upgrades include a series of new energy efficient plus deep retrofit archetypes for the Virtual Energy Analyzer (VEA). In addition, key new capabilities have been added to the software to facilitate and automate the ongoing commissioning of facilities, and to help implement RETScreen as an Energy Management Information System (EMIS).
Version 9.3 of the RETScreen® Clean Energy Management Software platform is now available for download from the RETScreen website.
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| Nourish Symposium 2025: Registration now open | |
Date: November 3-7, 2025
Time: 1:00pm-4:00pm ET daily
Location: Virtual
This November, join Nourish for a week of rich, challenging, and nourishing conversations at our 2025 Food for Health Symposium: 100 Million Better Bites!
With health care and food system leaders, practitioners, and partners, we’ll explore urgent and inspiring questions at the intersections of food, culture, climate, and care.
Daily virtual sessions will feature thought-provoking topics such as regenerative food and health systems, Indigenous knowledge and planetary health, anchor leadership, pathways for impact procurement, and meeting protein needs in a warming world.
Early bird registration is open now until September 28.
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Collaborating with IPAC to advance sustainability and reusables
CASCADES
Date: October 16, 2025
Time: 10am PT/ 1pm ET
Adopting reusables is a high-impact strategy for advancing sustainability. Infection prevention and control professionals and teams can play an important role in such efforts and are key allies for many initiatives to promote sustainability and resource stewardship.
Join CASCADES on October 16 for a conversation with IPAC leaders and frontline clinicians who are working to build a culture of reuse while ensuring quality and patient safety standards are met.
We’ll hear about opportunities for IPAC teams and other health care professionals to work together as allies in planning and implementing initiatives to adopt reusables in Canadian health care settings.
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Designing effective procurement models for decarbonization
Greening Health Care
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Time: 9:30am PT/12:30pm ET
This webinar will focus on crafting procurement models that align with decarbonization objectives in health care facilities.
Key topics include setting clear decarbonization targets from the outset, adopting prescriptive scoping methods to replace end-of-life assets with energy-efficient solutions, and leveraging financial models like pain-share, gain-share to drive stakeholder alignment.
The session will also cover best practices for monitoring progress through Measurement and Verification (M&V) and savings tracking, ensuring that decarbonization goals are met while maintaining transparency and accountability.
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Have you registered as an organ donor?
Contact your local organ donation agency and speak to your family about your wishes. You have the power to save and transform lives. Learn more and register to donate HERE.
| | The Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care is Canada’s premier green health care resource network, leading the evolution of green in Canada’s health sector as a national voice and catalyst for environmental change. www.greenhealthcare.ca | |
Some articles referred to in the Digest make reference to services and/or product offerings from specific suppliers. The CCGHC recommends that readers research the service and product offerings available through a wider range of suppliers for comparison purposes and in keeping with public sector purchasing guidelines. These articles should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any product or service. | | | | |
